Anthony
De Vere Tyndall of Basle,
Switzerland, has questions about the Nazi atomic bomb project in a letter of Wednesday, October 11,
2000
Questions and answers on Hitler’s atomic bomb project
I am an International Bacchalaureate Student in Basel and must accomplish a history assessment of 3000 words. I am doing it on the Nazi Bomb project. I was wondering if you could give me some guidelines on the following essay plan:
“Was the German Atomic Bomb Project a Failure?”
Question:
Explanation of criteria: what would constitute a failure?
what we are looking for? what is the standard we should use.
David
Irving answers: Both the Allied and the Nazi atomic projects saw two end products, a military weapon and a cheap source of energy. There are of course a third and a fourth spin-off by-product from any such project: the first is the specific advancement of science and technology in the area of uranium research; the second the psy-war benefit (mysterious rumours of enemy “secret weapons”).
In the first two areas, the Nazi project was a failure, because although great theoretical progress was achieved, their scientists ran out of time. The lessons that they would have learned by the time of their soourn in Farm Hall, Cambridgeshire, in
August 1945 was that in military science you cannot afford to rest on your laurels and be complacent.